Resilience and Responsibility: governing uncertainty in a complex world
Marc Welsh
Department of Geography and Earth Sciences
Aberystwyth University
Abstract
‘Resilience’ has risen to prominence across a range of academic disciplines and political
discourses. Situating resilience theories in historical context the paper argues that the
resilience discourse of complex adaptive systems, for all its utility as a means for
conceptualising and managing change, is allied with contemporary governmental discourses
that responsibilise risk away from the state and on to individuals and institutions. Further, in
arguing that resilience theories originate in two distinct epistemological communities (natural
and social science) in its mobilisation as a ‘boundary object’ (Brand & Jax 2007) resilience
naturalises an ontology of ‘the system’. Resilience approaches increasingly structure, not
only academic, but also government policy discourses, with each influencing the
development of the other. It is argued that by mobilising ‘the system’ as the metaconcept for
capturing socio-natural and socio-economic relations resilience theories naturalise and reify
two abstractions: firstly, the system itself – enrolling citizens into practices that give it
meaning and presence; secondly, the naturalisation of shocks to the system, locating them
in a post-political space where the only certainty is uncertainty. With reference to an
emerging governmentality through resilience this paper argues for a critical interrogation of
plural resilience theories and wonders at their emancipatory possibilities.
Keywords: resilience, risk, complex systems, government, governmentality
Introduction
In a world of complexity and contingency, of risk, relationality, flows and mutability theoretical
frameworks that promise a means of capturing that complexity are seductive. ‘Resilience’1 is
one such theory recently come to prominence - a ubiquitous term deployed within a variety
of epistemic communities as a means for understanding and managing ‘complex systems’2
and the processes and effects of change upon them.
The complexity turn in social sciences (Urry 2005), including geography (see O’Sullivan
2004; Harrison et al 2006; Martin & Sunley 2007) has provided a fertile bed for resilience
theory to flower. Pitched as a radical approach for thinking about change and stability
resilience (much like ‘sustainability’) serves as an interdisciplinary ‘boundary object’ (Brand &
Jax 2007). Mobile and mobilised across a diverse array of epistemic communities, both
academic and political, these concepts have evolved and cross-fertilised since the 1970s
into a framework of increasing centrality to a number of academic and political discourses,
notably around the management of uncertainty and risk.
There are two main, though to some extent converging, forms of resilience theory in
circulation that originate in distinct epistemological communities: mind-body disciplines,
principally psychology; and nature-society disciplines, principally ecology and economy.
Although resilience theories and research are determinedly multi- or trans-disciplinary they
rarely appear on the same page. Multi-disciplinary communities mobilise in distinct clusters
around either a person-community centred conception of resilience (‘psycho-social
resilience’) or a biophysical environment-community one (‘socio-ecological resilience’). In
nature-society disciplines socio-ecological resilience, the ‘science of surprise’ (Holling 1986),
dominates as either metaphor or methodology.
Common to most deployments of the concept is the invocation of crisis or trauma as “the
event” acting upon an entity (e.g. ecosystem, a child, an economic region). Resilience is
2
primarily conceived as the property that captures the capacity of the entity to anticipate,
adapt to and recover from the event such that it resumes its original configuration, shape,
functional relationships or trajectory afterwards. The linking of social and ecological systems
and integration of complexity theory produces a model of interlinked systems in continual
adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal (the ‘panarchy’ of
Gunderson & Holling 2002). This conceptual model has been particularly successful in
propagating itself across disciplinary knowledge domains, including human geography.
In the political domain there is also evidence of an emerging form of governmentality through
resilience. Resilience discourses mark a break with the modernism of the ‘risk society’ by
introducing novelty, adaptation, unpredictability, transformation, vulnerability and systems
into a governmental discourse that now makes the governance of uncertainty and
unpredictability a hallmark of rule. In this ‘period of crisis’ (Larner 2011) versions of resilience
are being mobilised to facilitate archetypal governmental technologies of neoliberalism;
government at a distance, technologies of responsibilisation, and practices of subjectification
that produce suitably prudent autonomous and entrepreneurial subjects in a world of
naturalised uncertainty and crisis.
An increasing number of publications use a resilience framework of some sort to structure
their analysis. Journals have devoted entire issues to the topic3 and the number of articles
has grown enormously (see Janssen 2007). Resilience framed degree schemes are
proliferating with numerous conferences sessions and individual workshops held on
resilience themes. The resilience agenda is also being driven by funding programmes.
Within the UK alone the ESRC, EPSRC, NERC, DFID, DEFRA, MRC and Leverhulme Trust
put out calls for applications on resilience themes in 2010 and 2011.
Given the volume of material produced and decades of (inter-) disciplinary theoretical
development this article can only sketch some dimensions of a melange of concepts
3
constructed as both pliable and fuzzy, precise and bounded. The aim is threefold. First to
provide a typology of resilience theory illuminating the epistemological and ontological
confusion and colonisation that occurs in translating these theories across disciplinary
knowledge domains. Second, to highlight the potential depoliticising and post-political nature
of the resilience discourse as it is mobilised in governmental structures. In its propagation
between academic discourses I highlight standing concerns about the ontological
colonisation of ‘complex systems’ theories that the adoption of a resilience epistemology
entails. In its propagation into the political domain I highlight the work it does in sustaining
and naturalising neoliberal paradigms of contemporary governance. Finally I consider the
emancipation of resilience and call for a more sustained and critical engagement by human
geographers with resilience studies and their effects.
Outside of its natural science setting, with a few notable exceptions (Martin et al 1993; Klein
et al 1998; Adger 2000), resilience theory has only entered the geographical lexicon in the
past half-decade. Yet resilience theories pivot around a number of inherently geographical
themes - scale, nature-society relations, communities and regions, risk and security,
management of environmental change, agency and affect.
Some characterise resilience theories as transformatory, a normative philosophy for shaping
change, producing active citizens and facilitating self-securing agency (Hopkins 2008;
Chandler 2012), a dynamic process for ‘bouncing forward’ (Shaw 2012) and changing to a
new, more sustainable, state. Others find its deployment problematic, a post-political
ideology of constant adaptation attuned to the uncertainties of neoliberal economy (Duffield
2011, 14) where the resilient subject is conceived as resilient to the extent it adapts to, rather
than resists, the conditions of its suffering (Reid 2012). An emerging critical literature links
complexity, resilience and modes of neoliberal governmentality, primarily coming from the
fields of security, development and international relations studies (Walker & Cooper 2011;
Duffield 2011; O’Malley 2010; Reid 2010, 2012; Zebrowski 2009). It is hoped this
4
intervention will encourage a similar critical engagement by geographers considering the
governmentalising effects of resilience discourses as operationalised through different
modes of governance.
A typology and genealogy of resilience
Resilience is a metaphor that captures the ability of something to rebound or resume its
original shape following exposure to a stressor. In the 1970s it came to be associated with
two distinct epistemic communities investigating separately the natural world and the inner
world of the traumatised child. Within a range of disciplines with their own methodological
histories two broadly parallel discourses evolved that might be termed ‘psycho-social
resilience’ and ‘socio-ecological resilience’. A third discourse (considered later in this paper)
emphasising the governance of risk and threats to the social body overlaps with the other
two but hews closely to political and public discourse on resilience as ‘robustness’ – that of
security, disaster planning and international development where ‘resilience’ has become the
politically accepted term of choice (Smith & Fischbacher 2009; Duffield 2011).
‘Psycho-social’ resilience theories: originate in studies in epidemiology and child
development in the 1970s (see Werner et al 1971; Werner 1993; Garmezy 1971 1985;
Murphy 1974; Rutter 1979). Oriented around the individual, their immediate community
relations and their response to adversity they are grounded in localities and places. As a field
of research it includes social (psychology, sociology, education, gerontology etc.) and natural
(biochemistry, genetics, neurology etc.) sciences (Curtis & Cicchetti 2003). Although
methodologically dissimilar they triangulate on similar objects of analysis – the individual and
their response and recovery from an adverse event.
Here resilience is the ability to recover from trauma, and a capacity to persist or sustain
health and psychological well-being in the face of continuing adversity (Ungar et al 2008;
Zautra et al 2010). The field has become more process oriented (Rutter 1990; Campbell-Sills
5
et al 2006; Friedli 2009) and normative, emphasising achieving “positive adaptation” in the
face of adversity (Luthar et al 2000, 543).
A striking example of the mobilisation of psycho-social resilience is the US Army/University
of Pennsylvania Resiliency Project collaboration - the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness
program (see O’Malley 2010). As an example of ‘governing through contingency’ (ibid) this
comprehensive programme of ‘resilience training’ conceives resilience as a skill that can be
learned, producing new resilient subjectivities capable and responsible for themselves in a
world of uncertainty.
The rescaling of psychological resilience from the body to the place based setting of the
community, notably in natural hazards and disaster management research, has incorporated
complex systems thinking, modelling community functions and conceptualising resilience as
an outcome of definable and measurable sets of community relations, e.g. cohesion,
communal imaginaries, external stressors etc. (see Flora, Flora and Fey 2004; Murphy 2007;
King 2008; Cutter et al 2008; Norris et al 2008; Kulig et al 2009; Buikstra et al 2010).
Although informed by complexity theories that presume non-linearity (see ‘The systems
ontology’
below)
underlying
such
approaches
is
an
assumption
that,
through
information/knowledge and design, resilience is a capacity that can be ‘built’.
‘Socio-ecological’ resilience theories:4 originate with Holling’s articulation of ‘ecological
resilience’ (Holling 1973). Resilience had been conceived as a property of a system that
makes it return to an equilibrium or a steady state after a disturbance (or ‘engineering
resilience’ (Gunderson 2000)). In contrast ‘ecological resilience’ defines or measures “the
capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as
to still retain the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Walker et al 2004, 2).
6
The ‘non-equilibrium’ emphasis of ecological resilience represented a radical break with
ecological theories that preceded it, providing a basis for critique of the prevailing
productivist resource management theories of the time. Within this framing the objects or
actors that make up a system can exist in multiple configurations or ‘regimes’ and crucially
may at some point fundamentally change – characterised as a regime shift (Walker & Salt
2006) (see Nadasdy 2010 for a questioning of the extent to which this represents a genuine
paradigm shift in ecological theory).
Led by the Resilience Alliance network, notably through its house journal Ecology and
Society, the concept was extended to human ‘systems’, or more accurately social-ecological
systems (SES) in the 1990s.
The incorporation of a scalar and reflexive motif linking
systems in a nested hierarchy is described by the term “panarchy”, a meta-concept
presented by Gunderson and Holling in their edited volume Panarchy: Understanding
Transformations in Systems of Humans and Nature (2002).
Panarchy is fundamentally
concerned with governance and scale. All systems are described as existing and functioning
at multiple scales of space, time and social organization with interactions across scales
being important in determining the dynamics of the system at any particular focal scale
(Resilience Alliance 2002).
It is this complex adaptive systems iteration of the theory that has attracted wider academic
attention in recent years, including (not uncritically) within geographical research; as a
means for imagining urban,5 regional and economic geographies,6 but most directly in
research into the socio-ecologies of environmental change.7
The dangers and difficulties of translating theories and concepts between epistemic
communities have not been lost on researchers instrumental in developing and popularising
the discourse outside its ecological heartlands. Not only are the difficulties of transferring
resilience theory between epistemic communities recognised (Adger 2000), but from its
7
origins as a descriptive-analytical term it has been pluralised and stretched into a more
malleable concept that in academic and political realms now purportedly functions as a
general approach to systems analysis. Yet for resilience theorists resilience provides a
methodological foundation from which to develop and test theory and answer defined
questions in empirical settings. As such there is an evident desire for conceptual precision,
hence calls for greater conceptual clarity (Martin 2012), suggestions of constraining specified
resilience to the ecological realm (Brand & Jax 2007) and calls for working towards a
common lexicon (Gallopín 2006; Miller et al 2010).
Resilience research claims to be “determinedly holistic: it treats social and ecological
systems as a fully integrated whole” (Harrison 2003, 1). As a result resilience researchers
are “guided by rationalist assumptions [to] look to economics and sociology for their social
systems exemplars and overlook the peculiar characteristics of the political system that
generates the policies they hope to change and the governance of the ecosystems
management that they want to improve.” (ibid, 7; see also Hornborg 2007). In recognising
these critiques of socio-ecological resilience, in particular its weak integration and
appropriation of social theory and methodologies (Harrison 2003) there is a turn towards
‘epistemological pluralism’ (Miller et al 2008) and actively exploring more integrative
approaches (e.g. see Cote & Nightingale 2012).
There has been critical interrogation of resilience as a structuring discourse of government,
governmental practices and the production of new subjectivities in the fields of disaster
studies, international relations, international development, security studies and analysis of
social risk8. In geography, with notable exceptions (e.g. Coaffee and Roger’s (2008) ‘dark
side of resilience planning’, urban security and the responsibilisation of community resilience
as governmentality, Anderson & Adey’s (2012) emergency and the governing of life,
Davoudi’s (2012) ‘power-blind’ resilience), interrogation of the ways this increasingly
structuring concept is deployed in practices of government and governance has been
8
limited. Before reviewing the extent to which resilience thinking is embedded in
contemporary governmental rationalities I briefly turn to the ontological question of the
system.
The systems ontology – from metaphor to materiality
The incorporation of complexity theory into natural and social science research brings with it
the ‘complex adaptive system’ (CAS) as an ontological category. Such systems are
conceived as essentially biological entities; a complex of multiple interacting agents that
possess capacities to interact with other agents and artefacts. The system is self-organising,
emergent from those interactions, and non-linear in outcomes – in other words the effects of
a simple interaction in one part of the system can produce large and complex effects in other
parts of it. But the key word in the CAS is ‘adaptive’. It is the adaptive capacity of such
systems, the ability of the system as a whole to cope and respond to the unforeseen, the
unpredictable and the new, whether from its ‘external’ environment or arising from changes
or damage to its ‘internal’ structures that characterises the relative resilience of a system.
The recent flourishing of resilience approaches across social and natural sciences and
political domains may in part be explained by the longer term inter-disciplinary circulation of
complexity and systems discourses going back to Durkheim, von Bertalanffy and Parsons,
but in particular Hayek and Boulding (see Walker & Cooper 2011). These complex systems
discourses are in turn situated within a wider historical cultural discourse of holism or
organicism.
The resilience approach is, if not derived from then certainly influenced by the cultural idea
of ‘individualistic holism’ (Kirchhoff et al 2010). The world is imagined to a priori consist of
systems in which entities and their non-living environments are intrinsically connected by
characteristic functional interdependencies, interdependencies that self-regulate the
9
ecosystem as a functioning unit. In these terms ecosystems are understood as objectively
existing functionally integrated units. One of the long standing controversies in ecological
science has been about the ontological status of ecosystems. Is the unity of ecosystems
objectively given by nature or subjectively defined by man? (see Kirchhoff et al 2010 for
provocative answers to the question).
Certainly the proposition that “ecological and social domains of social-ecological systems
can be addressed in a common conceptual, theoretical, and modelling framework” (Walker
et al 2006, 13) is inherently problematic on a number of levels. The most fundamental is the
presumption of the ontological soundness of ‘the system’ as a functionally integrated
community of objects and agents. Equally problematic are the assumptions of sufficient
commonalities between economic, social and ecological ‘complex systems’ to justify the
translation of theory and models between them. Then there are potential epistemological
ruptures between disciplines not least the historically greater interest in neo-Lamarckian
evolutionary approaches in social sciences. But, as I come onto later, a primary concern is
the mobilisation of these complex systems theories as translated and transformed through
the power-knowledge complex of government.
Whilst the complex adaptive systems ontology is most obvious in socio-ecological resilience
research it also provides a foundation for psycho-social resilience research. Having identified
potential assets or protective factors associated with the degree of resilience displayed by
individuals in the face of adversity the ‘second wave’ of psycho-social resilience research
focused on uncovering the processes and regulatory systems that account for such factors.
Accepting the idea that ‘resilience can be applied to any functional system’, in this context
most frequently the individual as a ‘living system’ (Masten & Obradovic 2006, 14), focus has
recently turned to uncovering the multiple ‘adaptive systems’ that are implicated in the
resilience of individuals and communities. At the same time a dialogue between psychosocial and socio-ecological theorists has sprung up which has highlighted “striking parallels
10
in the conceptualization of the resilience of a living human organism in developmental
science and the resilience of an ecosystem in ecology, perhaps because both sciences were
strongly influenced by general systems theory” (Masten & Obradovic 2008, 6).
Complexity theories stress contingency and non-linear ‘evolutionary’ (adaptive, reflexive)
properties of complex systems. Resilience as an approach to systems management is
therefore inter alia defined in terms of improving ‘evolutionary capacity’ or the fitness of
systems or people (Zebrowski 2009, 2). In response to a catastrophic event systems that
have been constructed to be best able to withstand, rebound or better yet rebuild and make
better systems are the most resilient. They have the greatest evolutionary capacity, or more
precisely they have greater adaptive capacity.
As Reid argues this conception of ‘adaptiveness’ permeates international discourses of risk,
humanitarian relief and development. The biopoliticisation of security has seen disasters
reproblematized as inevitable and necessary phenomena. The objective of governance
regimes becomes facilitating capacities in complex systems to adapt and maintain an
acceptable level of functioning and structure in the wake of uncertainty. Here the resilience
approach has been critically identified with construing the emergency as ‘a moment and site
of profound “opportunity” for societies to transform themselves so that they might be
governed differently’ (Reid 2010, 404).
In an age of ‘generalized crisis’ (Larner 2011) and contingency resilience discourses offer a
means to imagine a way for individuals to live with socio-natural uncertainty whilst
maintaining collective functionality. However, in their operationalisation as governance
strategies they may do so in a manner that presumes that in its essentials the system can be
captured, modelled and managed, coupled with an unstated expectation that, for all the
emphasis on adaptation and flexibility, what is needed is to make the components of the
11
system appropriately fit for the system. Here resilience becomes ‘an ideology attuned to the
uncertainties of a neoliberal economy’ (Duffield 2011, page 14)
The governmentalisation of resilience
Outside the hallowed walls of the academy resilience has fast become ‘a pervasive idiom of
global governance’ (Walker and Cooper 2011, 144) where ‘resilience functions more as
ideology […] promoting a post-political life of constant adaptation, [and] the abandonment of
long-term expectations’ (Duffield 2011, 15). Fundamentally this is a discourse about human
security in a complex networked world. As Coaffee et al (2008), Lentzos and Rose (2009)
and O’Malley (2010) highlight these resilience discourses are situated in, and help
reproduce, broader neoliberal practices of security that shift from state-based to societybased conceptions of distributed risk and reaction. Such effects are most explicitly captured
in government policy and programmes relating to ‘the emergency’, international
development, environment, and security where a resilience approach that emphasises
adaptation, flexibility and functional continuity (e.g. of critical infrastructure) is promoted.
As a set of techniques there is much to commend an approach that emphasises (contra
characterisations
of
the
modernist,
interventionist
risk
society)
prevention
and
empowerment, the resilient subject conceived as an active agent, intervention targeted at
the vulnerable rather than victims (Chandler 2012). The objective of the resilience approach
as a technique of governance is notionally to enable individuals, institutions, eco-systems,
and economies to be responsible for transforming themselves in the face of a world of
contingency whilst also increasing their resistance to exogenous and internal shocks by
limiting the potential of events to provoke change. Resilience is therefore fundamentally
concerned with inculcating particular subjectivities that are fit for purpose in this context.
The breadth of fields in which a resilience approach of some sort is now structuring
12
government policy and practice is extensive. In international governance its reach is most
visible in international development, disaster planning (illustrated by the European Union
integration of emergency humanitarian and development arms under a ‘Resilience Paradigm’
(see EC Com (2012) 584, 4)), and in particular the all encompassing discourses of climate
change and sustainable development (e.g. see Resilient People: Resilient Planet, United
Nations 2012). Indeed in relation to climate change resilience and adaptation now sit sideby-side, potentially displacing the more revolutionary concept of mitigation.
To illustrate the penetration of resilience discourses into government and governance it is
useful to summarise this in a UK context. This empowering and active citizen conception of
resilience is more obvious, discursively at least, at local and international scales of
governance. At the national scale a more traditional ‘engineering resilience’ conception still
dominates thinking, mostly around civil contingencies planning. For example, local
government in the UK, encouraged by national government, increasingly conceives of
regional economic development and the relationship between government services and its
citizens in terms of ‘building resilience’. Illustrative of this approach is the London Borough of
Newham which has taken forward an explicitly psycho-social conception of resilience and
sought to apply it to its reimagining of welfare state policy through a focus on: personal
resilience, community resilience and economic resilience (Newham 2011).
In a similar vein the After the Riots report drew heavily on psycho-social resilience research
for its analysis and structural framework to understand and propose policy responses to the
2011 English city riots (Riots Communities and Victims Panel 2012). Psycho-social resilience
discourses are also visible in national government policy. New Labour embedded it into a
number of its programmes, notably through the Department for Education (e.g. see the UCL
Institute of Education ‘Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary Education’ research study,
or, under the auspices of ‘Every Child Matters’, the piloting of the UK Resilience Programme
in schools from 2007 (DfE 2010).
13
At the regional level resilience provides an optic through which both academia (e.g. see
Fingleton et al 2012) and practitioners conceptualise, co-produce and service the economy.
Allied with the rise of city-regional thinking this is most obviously illustrated by the Yorkshire
Cities Strengthening Local Economies programme and their development of an Index of
Economic Resilience (ekosgen 2011). The programme started in 2008, developing a toolkit
to enable areas to assess their resilience using six knowledge domains of economic
structure, enterprise, workforce skills, economic inclusion, place & population and
infrastructure & connectivity (such toolkits translate and mobilise a resilience model in
various settings, e.g. community emergency planning through the Cabinet Office, business
opportunities from climate change (Defra’s 2011 ‘Climate Resilience Toolkit’), and even the
emotional management of employees (BitC 2009)). Modified forms of this analysis have
been applied as a regional mechanism of economic knowledge generation and policy
tweaking in a number of other parts of the UK, e.g. Scotland (ekosgen 2009) or the Experian
Local Resilience Assessments incorporating data for 324 local authority districts (Experian
2010).
However, the most obvious adoption of a resilience approach is seen in ways of ‘governing
emergency’ (Andersen & Adey 2012), particularly its national security and local emergency
response
plans
where
(exemplifying
earlier
statements
about
‘responsibilisation’)
responsibility for ‘preparedness’, ‘response’ and ‘recovery’ lies in localities, reserving for
central government an authoritative co-ordinating and facilitating role (see Cabinet Office
2010; Cabinet Office 2011a & b & c & d, Defra 2011). The biopolitics of resilience in UK civil
contingencies planning are well documented by Zebrowski (2009), and Anderson & Adey
provide a detailed exploration of the emergence of emergency and its various configurations
in relation to civil contingencies planning (2012).
Local Resilience Forums and Regional Resilience Teams were established under the Civil
14
Contingencies Act 2004. UK Resilience is the Cabinet Office led team that seeks to
coordinate and embed resilience to natural or manmade disaster into all areas of the UK. A
whole host of toolkits and plans exist, such as a National Resilience Plan for Critical
Infrastructure (Cabinet Office 2010) and the Strategic National Framework on Community
Resilience (Cabinet Office 2011a) which serve to coordinate preparation, response and
recovery to the unknowable, but mostly guessable event. One example of such ‘known
unknowns’ is the ever present threat of climate change, now increasingly conceptualised in
terms of ‘climate resilience’ (such as in the cross-government Climate Resilient Infrastructure
Strategy (Defra 2011)).
These strategies are mostly concerned with an older, engineering resilience conception of
resilience as essentially being robustness, an ability to withstand shocks to the system rather
than to adapt and reconfigure in response to them. More recently the adaptive (and flexible)
systems version of resilience that emphasises that the brittleness of a system stems from
rigidity and centralised command and control systems has come to prominence, notably in
relation to thinking about communities, climate, development and human security. This is
exemplified in the strapline of Resilient Nation, a report into ‘our brittle society’ (Edwards
2009, 9) prepared by the think tank Demos, which reads: “Next generation resilience relies
on citizens and communities, not the institutions of state...”. This influential report presented
a locality based imaginary of ‘community resilience’ that was ‘premised on institutions and
organisations letting go […], and allowing community resilience to emerge and develop in
local areas over time’ (ibid, 80). The fit with the Conservative Party ‘Big Society’/small state
ideology are obvious and unsurprisingly the UK Resilience (2012) programme adopted the
Demos definition and rationale of resilience in its Strategic National Framework on
Community Resilience (Cabinet Office 2011a, 4).
Urban policy is also increasingly shaped by a resilience agenda at a domestic, but also
international, scale (see, ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability and its ongoing
15
Resilient Cities programme, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and its Making Cities
Resilient campaign, and the World Bank approach to Climate-Resilient Cities). The
capacities of urban environments to facilitate and hinder social capabilities to prepare for,
respond to, and recover from multi-hazard threats are primarily framed around climate
change, terrorism and natural (biotic and abiotic) hazards such as earthquakes or
heatwaves. Again the goal is to build resilience to shocks by adapting the environment or
social practices (see Coaffee 2008) to mitigate against the effects of that shock and to
ensure system function, (notably in relation to integration into the global economy), is
maintained. Such approaches entail disciplining not only the material urban environment but
also the subjectivities of those living in them where resilience provides the conceptual
metaphor for, and rationale for the governance of emergency (Coaffee et al 2008, Andersen
& Adey 2012).
These resilience approaches operate on the normative assumption that communities can
and should self-organise to deal with uncertainty, that that uncertainty is a given not
something with a political dimension, and the role of government is limited to enabling,
shaping and supporting, but specifically not to direct or to fund those processes. This locates
the responsibility of ‘communities’ as needing to organise themselves, primarily in the
context of sustaining economic growth. As a consequence there is little sign of a profound
engagement with a politics of resilience as a means for conceiving of change; of revolution
through resilience.
In providing a framework for governing uncertainty in complex networked social
systems/settings resilience foregrounds the where, when and how of change inducing
events but might this be at the expense of giving much consideration to the why of them?
Resilient subjectivities
16
“The human here is conceived as resilient in so far as it adapts to rather than resists
the conditions of its suffering in the world. To be resilient is to forego the very power
of resistance” (Reid 2012, 76)
A major criticism of the resilience approaches are their co-option into a neoliberal
governmentality. For example, in tracing a genealogy of ecological resilience theory Walker
& Cooper (2011) point to a shift in resilience theory from its origins as a critique of Cold War
‘command and control’ resource management to a ‘methodology of power’ (ibid, 143) across
a number of social domains. Hornborg goes one stage further. In a critique grounded in
concern with the functionalist overtones of resilience science Hornborg sees a major
weakness in the resilience discourse is it is “oblivious not only of power, conflict and
contradiction, but also of culture” (Hornborg 2009, 255). As such resilience is politically
neutral, sitting comfortably with a consensus rhetoric of criticality (certain practices are ‘bad’
or unsustainable) yet proffering technocratic solutions (of adaptive management) framed
within and using the same (capitalist) logic and vocabulary (of capital and services etc.) that
those problems result from. Consequently the resilience discourse can become defined by a
set of consensual socio-scientific knowledges that reduce the political to the policing of
change (Swyngedouw 2009), diverting attention from questions of power, justice, or the
types of (socio-natural) future that can be envisaged. For Hornborg this is why resilience and
not revolution is the rallying-cry of the early twenty first century (ibid, 252).
Such approaches to manage naturalised processes of rapid or slow change also reshape
the subjectivity of the resilient subject (as adaptive, flexible, resilient) and its relationship with
the state. As Julian Reid contends, “‘Resilient’ peoples do not look to states to secure their
wellbeing because they have been disciplined into believing in the necessity to secure it for
themselves” (2012, 69).
17
Resilience holds out the promise of knowing ‘when’ change enters a system, in turn holding
out the promise of managing change, of ameliorating its unacceptable effects. However,
paradoxically through that technology it also holds the promise of avoiding fundamental
change. Certainly it introduces flexibility and adaptability but framed in terms of maintaining
system function as the priority, with responsibility for maintaining function something
distributed throughout the system. As such it could be said to produce active citizens and
active institutions whose act is to maintain the status quo rather than conceive of challenging
it.
There is a growing literature on the link between complexity, resilience and the production of
neoliberal subjectivities (Lentzos and Rose 2009, Reid 2012, Duffield 2011, O’Malley 2010).
With notable exceptions (e.g. Coaffee & Rodgers 2008, Coaffee et al 2008) a critical
analysis of the resilient subject has received little attention within human geographic
research. It falls outside the scope of this paper to tackle that lacuna, however, resilience
approaches to the governance of uncertainty should be subject to sustained critical
interrogation.
Concluding remarks – the emancipation of resilience?
Resilience discourses, as mobilised through the institutions of government seem to have a
number of implications. They foreground a concern with technologies of preparedness and
planning, disperse uncertainty and responsibility for being prepared and respons-able
throughout the system, and are institutionalised in apparatus of government and governance
to fashion adaptive subjects that act autonomously to secure the system against exogenous
and endogenous shocks.
There is need to theoretically emancipate resilience as a concept, sensitive to its
historiography. As a heuristic this plurality of resilience theories are very useful tools. They
18
allow us to simplify extreme complexity. However, the way resilience is deployed in
academic and political spheres seems to suggest that that simplification might itself be
mistaken for the messy materiality of life in all its forms and species. As I have argued the
inherent danger is that policy and academic analysis becomes concerned with
understanding and maintaining a system shorn of political context or attention to questions of
power and inequality.
By fetishising the complex adaptive system, by being overly concerned with an abstract
concept rather than the real world do we make the maintenance of the system the objective
of governance, the measure of success being the preservation of the system rather than the
protection of citizens? What role does the researcher and research process play in making
the system visible, in imbuing it with an ontological permanence that over-simplifies the very
complexity of life such research aims to capture? Does resilience thinking ultimately facilitate
a post-political epistemology, principally concerned with the ‘right disposition of things’ (to
paraphrase Foucault) in the system to maintain ‘the system’, erasing the possibility of
fundamental change.
This post-political dimension of an approach that deals with the most political of questions
(the causes, distribution and effects of differentiated risk in a global society) is somewhat
perplexing. Yet there are examples of the practical emancipation of resilience. More radical
conceptions of resilience, conceptions that are perhaps more closely allied with the
normative intentions of the socio-ecological theory’s originators, have also emerged.
Ecological resilience presumes the existence of alternative semi-stable states. Some
theorists and social activists have mobilised resilience to imagine how a ‘regime shift’ can be
brought into being. There exists a growing literature on ‘socio-technical transitions’ (see Rip
& Kemp 1998; Smith et al 2005; Pelling 2010) which in socio-ecological resilience research
has focused on transition management towards the normative goal of ‘sustainability’ (Smith
19
& Stirling 2010). Recognising the capacity of systems to change, and the significance of
‘system resilience’ as both a constrainer and enabler of alternative regimes, resilience is
reconceived as an analytical framework for examining change itself (for example see
Jerrnick & Olsson 2008; Fischer-Kowalski & Rotmans 2009; Klein et al 2003; Newton 2010;
Coaffee 2008 2009).
While the theorisation of this new “multiscale resilience and transformability” discourse
(Folke et al 2010, 24) has begun it is in political and practical discourses of grassroots
societal change that the emancipatory potential of resilience theory has been most explicitly
articulated. One of the clearest attempts to utilise resilience theory as a basis for achieving
‘regime shift’ is the so called Transition Town movement, summarised in Hopkins (2008)
populist “The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience”. Here
resilience has become an organising principle around which to achieve transition to a
localised low carbon future. Transition Town’s are a recent iteration of localist civil society
responses to the effects of globalising socio-economic practices (for engagement with the
resilience of Transition Town practice see, Bristow 2010; Mason and Whitehead 2011; Bailey
et al 2010; Wilson 2012).
It is not my intent to dismiss or negate the utility of resilience theories in helping provide
heuristics for understanding, responding to and managing change. Indeed the socioecological resilience literature is replete with welcome applications of resilience approaches
for progressive and empowering purposes. My concern is with unintended consequences
arising from the totalising effects of a complex systems discourse colonising a wide range of
academic disciplines. Through interdisciplinary encounters it might animate new debates but
it also frames them in terms that ultimately depoliticise and naturalise a world of uncertainty
and render them knowable in the common vocabulary of capital. That the unexpected
happens, whether in occurrence or as an effect of a complex non-linear world, is not
contested. But I would urge a note of caution in placing such emphasis upon a concept and
20
approach to contingency that in its political mobilisation risks facilitating the abdication of
responsibility by the collective and relocates it to the individual.
References
Adger W N 2000 Social and ecological resilience: are they related? Progress in
Human Geography 24 (3) 347-364
Adger W N 2006 Vulnerability Global Environmental Change 16, 268-81
Adger W N and Brown K 2009 Vulnerability and Resilience to Environmental Change: Ecological
and Social Perspectives in Castree N, Demeritt D, Liverman D and Rhoads D eds 2009 A
Companion to Environmental Geography Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.
Adger W N Hughes, Folke T P, Carpenter C, Rockström J 2005 Social-ecological resilience to
coastal disasters Science 309 (5737) 1036-1039
Andersen B & Adey P 2012 Governing events and life: ‘Emergency’ in UK Civil
Contingencies Political Geography 31 (1) 24–33
Bailey I, Hopkins R, Wilson G 2010 Some things old, some things new: The spatial
representations and politics of change of the peak oil relocalisation movement
Geoforum, 41 (4) 595–605
Berkes F, Folke C eds 1998 Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and
Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
BitC 2009 Emotional Resilience Toolkit Business in the Community
http://www.bitc.org.uk/document.rm?id=9411
Bohle H-G, & Warner K eds 2008 Megacities: Resilience and Social Vulnerability United Nations
University, Bonn
Boschma R, & Martin R L 2007 Constructing an Evolutionary Economic Geography Journal of
Economic Geography 7 537-548
Brand F S, & Jax K 2007 Focusing the meaning(s) of resilience: resilience as a descriptive
concept and a boundary object Ecology and Society 12(1) 23
Bristow G 2010 Resilient regions: re-‘place'ing regional competitiveness Cambridge Journal of
Regions, Economy & Society 3 (1) 153-167 doi: 10.1093/cjres/rsp030
Buikstra E, Ross H, Hegney D, McLachlan K, Rogers-Clark C 2010 The components of
resilience – perceptions of an Australian rural community Journal of Community Psychology, 38
(8) 975-991
Cabinet Office 2010 National Resilience Plan for Critical Infrastructure
Cabinet Office 2011a A Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience, available at:
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/Strategic-National-Framework-onCommunity-Resilience_0.pdf Accessed: 2/04/2011]
Cabinet Office 2011b Sector Resilience Plans for Critical Infrastructure 2010 / 2011
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/sector-resilience-plan-2011.pdf
21
Cabinet Office 2011c Keeping the Country Running: Natural Hazards and Infrastructure - A
Guide to improving the resilience of critical infrastructure and essential services
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/natural-hazards-infrastructure.pdf
Cabinet Office 2011d Corporate Resilience: SME Resilience Strategy
(http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/corporate-resilience-sme-resilience-strategy) Accessed
03/04/2012
Campbell-Sills L, Cohan S L, Stein M B 2006 Relationship of resilience to personality, coping,
and psychiatric symptoms in young adults Behaviour Research and Therapy 44 (4) 585-599
Carpenter S, Walker B, Anderies J M, Abel N 2001 From metaphor to measurement:
Resilience of what to what? Ecosystems 4 (8) 765-781
Cash D W, Adger W N, Berkes F, Garden P, Lebel L, Olsson P, Pritchard L and Young O 2006
Scale and cross-scale dynamics: governance and information in a multi-level world Ecology and
Society, 11(2) 8
Chandler D 2012 Resilience and human security: The post-interventionist paradigm
Security Dialogue 43 (3) 213-229
Christopherson S, Michie J, Tyler P 2010 Editor s Choice: Regional resilience: theoretical and
empirical perspectives Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society 3 (1) 3-10
Coaffee J 2008 Risk, resilience, and environmentally sustainable cities Energy Policy 36 (12)
4633-4638
Coaffee, J 2009 Terrorism, Risk and the Global City: Towards Urban Resilience Ashgate:
Aldershot
Coaffee J, Murkami-Wood D & Rogers P 2008 The Everyday Resilience of the City,
Palgrave/Macmillian
Coaffee J & Rogers P 2008 Rebordering the city for new security challenges: From Counter
Terrorism to Community Resilience Space and Polity 12 ( 2) 101-118
Cote M & Nightingale A J 2012 Resilience thinking meets social theory: Situating change in
socio-ecological systems (SES) research Progress in Human Geography, published online
December 2011 doi:10.1177/0309132511425708
Curtis W J, & Cicchetti D 2003 Moving research on resilience into the 21st century: Theoretical
and methodological considerations in examining the biological contributors to resilience
Development and Psychopathology 15 773-810
Cutter S L, Barnes L, Berry M, Burton C, Evans E, Tate E & Webb J 2008 A place-based
model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters Global Environmental Change
18 598–606
Davoudi S 2012 Resilience: A Bridging Concept or a Dead End? Planning Theory & Practice 13
(2) 299–333
Defra 2011 Climate Resilient Infrastructure: Preparing for a Changing Climate Stationary Office
DfE 2010 UK Resilience programme evaluation: Second interim report, prepared by Challen A,
Noden P, West A, Machin S for Department for Education June 2010 ISBN 978-1-84775-760-9
Duffield M 2011 Environmental Terror: Uncertainty, Resilience and the Bunker University of
Bristol Working Paper No. 06-11 available at:
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/spais/research/workingpapers/wpspaisfiles/duffield-0611.pdf
22
Eden S 2005 Green, gold and grey geography: legitimating academic and policy expertise,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 282–286 doi:10.1111/j.14755661.2005.00170.x
Edwards C 2009 Resilient Nation DEMOS, London
ekosgen 2009 Scottish Index of Economic Resilience, ekosgen available online at:
http://www.edas.org.uk/resources/ekosgenscottishresilience.pdf
ekosgen 2011 Strengthening Local Economies The Index of Economic Resilience 2011 – final
report ekosgen available online at
http://www.yorkshirecities.org.uk/assets/files/Publications/Final%20Report%20final.pdf [access
date: 17/01/2012]
Evans J P 2011 Resilience, ecology and adaptation in the experimental city Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 36 223–237, doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00420.x
Experian 2010 Local Economic Resilience Experian Ltd, available online from:
http://publicsector.experian.co.uk/Products/~/media/FactSheets/Strategy%20and%20research/Lo
cal%20economic%20resilience%20%20%20Sept10.ashx [Access date: 11/3/2011]
Fingleton B, Garretsen H, Martin R 2012 Recessionary Shocks And Regional Employment:
Evidence On The Resilience Of U.K. Regions Journal of Regional Science 52: 109–133
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9787.2011.00755.x
Fischer-Kowalski M, & Rotmans J 2009 Conceptualizing, Observing, and Influencing Social–
Ecological Transitions Ecology and Society 14 (2) 3
Flora C B, Flora J L and Fey S 2004 Rural Communities: Legacy and Change 2nd edn
Westview Press, Boulder, CO
Folke C, Carpenter S, Elmqvist T, Gunderson L, Holling C S, Walker B, Bengtsson J, Berkes
F, Colding J, Danell K, Falkenmark M, Gordon L, Kaspersson R, Kautsky N, Kinzig A, Levin
S A, Mäler K -G, Moberg F, Ohlsson L, Olsson P, Ostrom E, Reid W, Rockström J, Savenije,
H & Svedin U 2002 Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a
world of transformations Report for the Swedish Environmental Advisory Council, Ministry of the
Environment, Stockholm, Sweden
Folke C, Carpenter S R, Walker B, Scheffer M, Chapin T & Rockström J 2010 Resilience
thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability Ecology and Society 15 (4) 20
Friedli L 2009 Mental Health, Resilience and Inequalities WHO, Denmark
Furedi F 2008 Fear and Security: A Vulnerability-led Policy Response Social Policy &
Administration 42 (6) 645–661 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9515.2008.00629.x
Gallopin G C 2006 Linkages between Vulnerability, Resilience and Adaptive Capacity , Global
Environmental Change 16 293-303
Garmezy N 1971 Vulnerability research and the issue of primary prevention , The American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry 41 101-116
Garmezy N 1985 Stress-resistant children the search for protective factors , in Stevenson J E
eds Recent research in developmental psychopathology Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry Book (Suppl) 4 213-233
Gleeson B 2008 Critical Commentary - Waking from the Dream: An Australian Perspective on
Urban Resilience Urban Studies 45 2653-2668
23
Godschalk D R 2003 Urban Hazard Mitigation: Creating Resilient Cities Natural Hazards Review
4 (3) 136-144
Gunderson L 2000 Ecological Resilience – In Theory and Application Annual Review of Ecology
and Systematics 31 425-439
Gunderson, L H & Holling C S eds 2002 Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human
and Natural Systems Island Press, Washington, D C
Hassink R 2010 Regional resilience: a promising concept to explain differences in regional
economic adaptability?, Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society, 3 (1) 45-58
Harrison, N 2003 Good governance, complexity, institutions, and resilience, presentation at the
open meeting of the Global Environmental Change Research Community, October, Montréal
Available online: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/openmtg/docs/Harrison.pdf
Harrison S, Massey D, Richards K 2006 Complexity and emergence (another conversation)
Area, 38:465–471 doi:10.1111/j.1475-4762.2006.00711.x
Holling C S 1973 Resilience and stability of ecological systems Annual Review of Ecology and
Systematics 4 1–23
Holling C S 1986 Resilience of ecosystems; local surprise and global change pp 292-317 in
Clark W C & Munn R E eds Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge
Holling C S 1996 Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience , in Schulze P C eds
Engineering within Ecological Constraints, National Academy Press: Washington
Holling C S, Gunderson L, Ludwig D 2002 In Quest of a Theory of Adaptive Change in
Gunderson L H & Holling C S eds Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and
Natural Systems Island Press, Washington, D C : 3-24
Hopkins R 2008 The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience Green
Books, Totnes
Hornborg A 2009 Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load
Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System International Journal of
Comparative Sociology 50 237-262, doi:10.1177/0020715209105141
Janssen M A 2007 An update on the scholarly networks on resilience, vulnerability, and
adaptation within the human dimensions of global environmental change Ecology and Society 12
(2) 9 [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss2/art9/
King C A 2008 Community resilience and contemporary agri-ecological systems: reconnecting
people and food, and people with people Systems Research & Behavioural Science 25 111–124,
doi: 10.1002/sres.854
Kirchhoff T, Brand F S, Hoheisel D & Grimm V 2010 The One-Sidedness and Cultural Bias of
the Resilience Approach, GAIA 19 (1) 25– 32 www.oekom.de/gaia
Klein R J T, Smit M J, Goosen H & Hulsbergen, C H 1998 Resilience and vulnerability: coastal
dynamics or Dutch dikes? The Geographical Journal 164 259–268
Klein R J T, Nicholls R J, Thomalla F 2003 Resilience to natural hazards: How useful is this
concept?, Environmental Hazards 5 35-45
Kulig J C, Edge D, Guernsey J 2009 Community resiliency and rural nursing: Canadian and
Australian perspectvies , in Winters C A & Lee, H J eds Rural Nursing: concepts, theory and
practice Springer, New York
24
Larner W 2011 C-change? Geographies of crisis Dialogues in Human Geography 1 (3) 319-335
Lentzos F & Rose N 2009 Governing insecurity: Contingency planning, protection, resilience.
Economy and Society 38 (2) 230–254
Luthar S S, Cicchetti D, Becker B 2000 The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and
Guidelines for Future Work Child Development, 71 (3) 543 – 562
Luthar S S 2006 Resilience in development: A synthesis of research across five decades in
Cicchetti, D & Cohen D J eds Development Psychology Volume 3 Risk, disorder and adaptation
Wiley, New Jersey
Martin R 2010 Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography-Rethinking Regional Path Dependence:
Beyond Lock-in to Evolution Economic Geography 86 (1) 1-27
Martin R, Sunley P, & Wills J 1993 The Geography of Trade Union Decline: Spatial Dispersal or
Regional Resilience? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18 (1) 36-62
Martin R & Sunley P 2007 Complexity thinking and evolutionary economic geography, Journal of
Economic Geography 7 (5) 573-601
Masten A S & Obradović J 2006 Competence and resilience in development Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences 1094: 13–27
Masten A S & Obradović J 2008 Disaster preparation and recovery: lessons from research on
resilience in human development. Ecology and Society 13 (1): 9. URL:
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss1/art9/
Mason K & Whitehead M 2012 Transition Urbanism and the Contested Politics of Ethical Place
Making Antipode 44 (2) 493-516
Miller T R, Baird T D, Littlefield C M, Kofinas G, Chapin III F, Redman C L 2008
Epistemological pluralism: reorganizing interdisciplinary research. Ecology and Society 13 (2) 46
URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss2/art46/
Murphy L B 1974 Coping, vulnerability, and resilience in childhood , in Coelho G V, Hamburg D
A, & Adams J E eds Coping and adaptation Basic Books, New York 69-100
Murphy B L 2007 Locating Social Capital in Resilient Community-Level Emergency Management
Natural Hazards 41 297-315
Nadasdy P 2010 Resilience and truth: A Response to Berkes, Maritime Studies (MAST) 9 (1) 4145
Newham Council 2011 Quid pro quo, not status quo. Why we need a welfare state that builds
resilience, available at: http://www.newham.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/835AAB4A-E651-4497-AAD8D40D4A9934AB/0/Whyweneedawelfarestatethatbuildsresilience.pdf
Newton P ed 2010 Transitions: Pathways Towards Sustainable Urban Development in Australia
CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood
Norris F, Stevens S, Pfefferbaum B, Wyche K, Pfefferbaum R 2008 Community Resilience as
a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness , American Journal of
Community Psychology 41 127–150, DOI 10.1007/s10464-007-9156-6
O’Malley P 2010 Resilient subjects: uncertainty, warfare and liberalism Economy and Society 39
(4) 488-509
O’Sullivan D 2004 Complexity science and human geography Transactions of the Institute of
25
British Geographers, 29 282–295 doi: 10.1111/j.0020-2754.2004.00321.x
Pelling M 2003 Vulnerability of Cities: natural disasters and social resilience Earthscan:
Routledge, London
Pelling M 2010 Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation Routledge,
Oxon
Perrings C 2006 Resilience and sustainable development, Environment and Development
Economics 11 417-427
Pimm D L 1984 The complexity and stability of ecosystems Nature 307 (26) 321-326
Reid J 2010 The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the
Biohuman in Post-Interventionary Societies Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 4 (4) 391411
Reid J 2012 The Disastrous and Debased Subject of Resilience Development Dialogue 58: 67-81
Resilience Alliance 2002 Key Concepts of Resilience Theory, [Access date: 12/11/2010]
Available at: http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/key_concepts
Riots Communities and Victims Panel 2012 After the Riots: the final report of the Riots
Communities and Victims Panel, [Access date: 28/03/2012] available online:
http://riotspanel.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Riots-Panel-Final-Report1.pdf
Rip A, Kemp R 1998 Technological Change, in Rayner S & Malone L eds Human Choice and
Climate Change, Vol 2, Resources and Technology Batelle Press, Washington DC, 327–400
Rutter M 1979 Protective factors in children s responses to stress and disadvantage in Kent M W
& Rolf J E eds Primary prevention in psychopathology: Social competence in children Vol 8
University Press of New England; Hanover, NH 49–74
Rutter M 1990 Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms, in Rolf J, Masten A S,
Cicchetti D, Neuchterlein K H, & Weintraub S eds Risk and protective factors in the
development of psychopathology Cambridge University Press, New York 181-214
Shaw K 2012 “Reframing” Resilience: Challenges for Planning Theory and Practice Planning
Theory & Practice 13 (2) 299–333
Simmie J & Martin R 2010 The economic resilience of regions: towards an evolutionary
approach Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3 (1) 27-43
doi: 10.1093/cjres/rsp029
Smith A, Stirling A & Berkhout F 2005 The governance of sustainable socio-technical
transitions Research Policy 34 (10) 1491-1510
Smith D & Fischbacher M 2009 The changing nature of risk and risk management: the
challenge of borders, uncertainty and resilience Risk Management 11 (1) 1-12
Smith A & Stirling A 2010 The politics of social-ecological resilience and sustainable sociotechnical transitions Ecology & Society 15 1 online
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss1/art11/
Swyngedouw E 2009 The Antinomies of the Postpolitical: In Search of a Democratic Politics of
Environmental Protection International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (3) 601–620
UK Resilience 2012 Cabinet Office UK Resilience website:
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience
26
Ungar M, Brown M, Leibenberg L, Cheung M, Levine K 2008 Distinguishing Differences In
Pathways To Resilience Among Canadian Youth Canadian Journal Of Community Mental Health
27 (1)
United Nations 2012 United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Global
Sustainability. Resilient people, resilient planet : A future worth choosing. New York: United
Nations
Urry J 2005 The Complexity Turn Theory Culture Society 22 1, DOI: 10.1177/0263276405057188
Vale L J & Campanella T J eds 2005 The Resilient City Oxford University Press, New York
Vogel C, Moser S C, Kasperson R E, Dabelko G D 2007 Linking vulnerability, adaptation, and
resilience science to practice: Pathways, players, and partnerships Global Environmental Change
17 349-364, DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2007.05.002
Walker B 1995 Conserving biological diversity through ecosystem resilience Conservation
Biology 9 (4) 747-752.
Walker J & Cooper C 2011 Genealogies of resilience: From systems ecology to the political
economy of crisis adaptation Security Dialogue 42 143-160, doi:10.1177/0967010611399616
Walker B H, Holling CS, Carpenter S R, & Kinzig A 2004 Resilience, adaptability and
transformability in social–ecological systems Ecology and Society 9 (2) 5
Walker B H, Gunderson L H, Kinzig A P, Folke C, Carpenter S R & Schultz L 2006 A handful
of heuristics and some propositions for understanding resilience in social-ecological systems
Ecology and Society 11(1) 13 [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art13/
Walker B & Salt D 2006 Resilience Thinking. Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing
World Island Press, Washington
Walker B H, Ludwig D, Holling C S, Peterman R M 1981 Stability of semi-arid savanna grazing
systems Journal of Ecology 69 (2) 473-498
Wallace D & Wallace R 2008 Urban systems during disasters: factors for resilience Ecology and
Society 13 (1) 18
Werner E E 1993 Risk, resilience, and recovery: Perspective from the Kauai longitudinal study.
Development and Psychopathology 5 503-515
Werner E E, Bierman J M & French F E 1971 The children of Kuai Honolulu University of Hawaii
Press, Hawaii
Wilson G 2012 Community resilience, globalization, and transitional pathways of decision-making
Geoforum 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.03.008
Zautra A, Hall J S, Murray K 2010 Resilience: a new definition of health for people and
communities , in Reich J W, Zautra A J & Hall J S eds Handbook of Adult Resilience The
Guildford Press, New York
Zebrowski C 2009 Governing the Network Society: A Biopolitical Critique of Resilience, Political
Perspectives 3 (1)
1
Multiple disciplinary definitions of the term exist (see Holling 1973; Rutter 1990; Kaplan 1999; Gunderson
2000; Adger 2006; Luthar 2006; Edwards 2009; Folke et al 2010; Zautra et al 2010). Brand & Jax (2007)
identify ten definitions of socio-ecological resilience alone.
27
2
The ‘complex systems’ referred to here are multiple, ranging from the macro scale of, for example, ecological
and financial systems, to the meso scale of regions and communities, to the micro scale of the human subject
and their neurological systems.
3
See: Journal of Clinical Psychology, Vol 58 (3) 2002; Substance Use & Misuse Vol 39 (5) 2004; Global
Environmental Change, Vol 16 2006; Development and Psychopathology, Vol 19 (13) 2007; Cambridge Journal
of Regions, Economy and Society, Vol 3 (1) 2010; Environmental Education Research 16 (5-6) 2010; Progress
in Development Studies Vol 10 (4) 2010; Critical Planning Vol 17 2010; International Journal of Disaster
Resilience in the Built Environment, 2010 - ; International Journal of Critical Infrastructures Vol 7 (1) 2011.
4
A snapshot of key publications include: Walker et al 1981; Pimm 1984; Holling 1986, 1996; Berkes & Folke
1998; Adger 2000; Carpenter et al 2001; Gunderson & Holling 2002; Holling et al 2002; Folke et al 2002;
Walker et al 2004; Adger et al 2005; Gallopin 2006; Perrings 2006; Walker et al 2006; Folke et al 2010.
5
e.g. in different contexts see Godschalk 2003; Bohle & Warner eds 2008; Gleeson 2008; Wallace & Wallace
2008; Coaffee 2008, 2009; Evans 2011.
6
e.g. Boschma and Martin 2007; Vale and Campanella 2005; Martin 2010; and see Christopherson et al 2010;
Hassink 2010; and Simmie & Martin 2010 in ‘The Resilient Region’ special issue of Cambridge Journal of
Regions, Economy and Society (March 2010) for critical and exploratory engagement with the resilience
metaphor.
7
e.g. Adger 2000; Adger & Brown 2009; Cash et al 2006
8
Furedi’s technocratic construction of resilience as solution to a “universal state of vulnerability” (2008),
Duffield’s resilience and the environment-security nexus (2011), Reid’s resilient subjectivities (2012),
O’Malley’s ‘mythology of resilience (2011), Walker & Cooper’s geneaology of resilience and crisis (2011),
Zebrowski’s production of prudent citizens (2009).
28